Kim Nguyen on his Oscar-vying film Rebelle: 'For me, it was a breakthrough'

Rebelle: Ken Nguyen calls his Oscar-vying film a breakthrough

When Kim Nguyen saw the armoured vehicles charging toward him, he knew he was in trouble.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo to shoot Rebelle, his film about a female child soldier in an unnamed African country, no amount of precautions could have prepared the director for the first day on set while using AK-47 assault rifles.

“We had sent television and radio announcements saying that this wasn’t’ an actual overturning of the government, this was a film,” says Nguyen, “but when we shot that first take, we had 20 armoured vehicles racing toward us with a rocket launcher and a 100 soldiers. The info didn’t get through to them, clearly.”

That he’s sitting in a room at the Intercontinental Hotel during the Toronto International Film Festival recounting the story proves there was a happy ending. It was thanks in no small part to his logistics manager, “a very courageous man,” he says, who ran in front of the advancing army, arms flailing, explaining to them that it was only a film.

“That’s one of my best film stories ever,” Nguyen says of the French-language drama, which has picked up a slew of accolades on the festival circuit, including a best actress and best narrative award at the Tribeca Film Festival and a Silver Bear best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival. (The film was also announced this week as Canada’s official entry for the best foreign-language Academy Award.)

“For me, this film was a breakthrough,” the Montreal-born filmmaker says, a massive understatement considering we spoke before the Oscar announcement was made.

Rebelle is Nguyen’s fourth feature film, and it’s something he started working on 10 years ago after reading about two Burmese twin brothers who, at nine years old, led an army of rebels in a fight against the government. His research, which included travelling to Burundi to speak with child soldiers, eventually led him to focus on conflicts in Angola, Sierra Leone and Sub-Saharan Africa.

“I read that there were female child solders as well, and I felt no one had given them a voice yet,” Nguyen says of switching his focus from two brothers to Komona (played by Rachel Mwanza), a 14-year-old girl forced to kill her parents and join the rebels, where she is believed to be a “war witch” with the powers to see hidden enemies.

For the child soldiers, Nguyen opted to use only non-actors from the capital city of Kinshasa, including the now award-winning Mwanza, a former street child who he describes as “a pure natural, just as powerful as they can get. … There’s an effervescence in the way she inhabits the moment.”

Nguyen says using children from the DRC, a country where 71% of its citizens live below the poverty line, added an “an authenticity beyond measures … as if they were fearless to be totally in the moment,” but first he was careful to make sure they were “strong psychologically to deal with the issues the film was addressing.”

Given their lack of acting experience, other adjustments were made, such as shooting the film chronologically and not allowing the cast to see any scripts. Instead, the scenes were constructed from what Nguyen calls “directed improvisations.”

“For a specific scene, I would take one of the actors and tell them their objective, then I would give something completely different to the other actor, creating a tango or conflict, in the sense of strengths dancing together,” he says. “That’s how they would improvise their dialogue. That was the scene.”

If an actor needed to say a certain line, Nguyen would tell them to say it, but for the most part this improvisational approach gave him exactly what he was looking for.

“They didn’t need to anticipate or fake surprise,” he says. “They really didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Obviously the approach worked, which has Nguyen planning to shoot his next film in a similar manner.

“There is a certain life pattern that comes out because it’s not narrative motivated — It’s just truth,” he says. “It makes it more, I guess, authentic.”